Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding

Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding: Glimpses of Lost London 1930-1980is a compilation of ten short archive films of London from between those years – a mixture of rediscovered public information films and amateur footage.

The film is primarily a nostalgic affair, with each short introduced by modern footage from the same location. While the archive footage is vibrant, full of people and activity and often hand-held, the modern shots are tightly framed, steady, full of mundane naturalist sounds (sirens, alarms, traffic) and sparsely populated. Quite why the modern age is best represented by the techniques of “slow cinema” is never quite addressed, nor is the question of why any of this archive footage is so nostalgic. The film prefers to merely show old footage and offers no contexts or opinions. As it is then, the film is merely a hodge-podge of little interest beyond some initial curiosity value.

The most interesting film is These Can Be Yours, a road safety film from Wembley Road Safety Council – a hopelessly dated and turgidly edited film that suggests that the most damaging consequence of a woman getting run over by a motorcycle is that her daughter will have to cook for her picky husband, who would much prefer his wife’s cooking. Similarly, her son’s attempts to help out in the kitchen will only lead to disaster – smashed dishes being worse than a smashed leg for a woman. Though amusingly archaic, it does lead one to wonder why this rather conservative project views such sexism with sentimentality.

More suffocating than nostalgic, Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding offers little beyond certain observations such as: “People seem so ill at ease when faced with a camera in those days.” With no unifying theme, the film is ultimately dull.

★★★★★

Matthew McKernan

Seven Streets, Two Markets and a Wedding is released nationwide on 23rd May 2014.